Blast Damage Days won me over with its humor and the fantastic audio design featuring a killer soundtrack (the credits song!) and full voice acting. Something can also be said for the incredible specificity of the story; the characters basically jump out of the screen thanks to how much care the dynamics between them are sketched out with, and the visual novel's depiction of a time and place, of a social circle, is convincing. It's above everything else fiercely efficient as a shortform work, making every scene and every line count.
That being said, the presentation is quite rough in some ways, and not every aspect comes off as a purposeful extension of the game's enjoyable lo-fi aesthetics. The good: the sprites are incredibly expressive, and I think basically every visual choice made with the designs works. For instance, the eyes alone communicate a lot about the characters – Jane's piercing glare is so good – and the colors feel cohesive. I also think the style just meshes well with the classic VN background filter the game has elected to use, and though the UI design of the menus is pretty messy, the vibes suit what the story is going for.
The less good: though sound is undeniably one of the game's strongest suits, I think things could have been pushed just a little further in a couple of scenes. While the music is super good, I think having voice acting underlines the lack of background ambience in some scenes, the concert in particular. It just sounds kind of weird when a person is speaking but you can't hear other prominent sounds that would diegetically be there, you know?
The writing makes some interesting decisions, like the narrator addressing the reader directly in a couple of places, but I'd describe it as somewhat distant on the whole. There's a lot of explaining what characters are feeling rather than that being conveyed directly through the prose – it's not quite as raw and immediate as what the striking aesthetics demand. Also, I'm not a big fan of the decision to put NVL mode text directly on top of the scene without any kind of overlay, since it's kind of difficult to read. The dialogue-heavy sections could have been reworked to ADV mode anyway, as going back and forth constantly is pretty distracting.
Ultimately a victory for the "je ne sais quoi" conception of what makes art good: despite having numerous nitpicks with the execution, I found the reading experience thrilling in a lot of ways. Good stuff.